The Brain: Short-Term Memory

Goals:

My goal for this project was to learn about what the brain really is and how it functions. More specifically I wanted to get a better understanding of how memory truly works and what might affect it, ether in a good or bad way. To explore this goal even more deeply I focused on if and how age affects Short-term memory. My goal was to answer the question I had about aging and memory.... Does the ability to recall short-term memory decrease with age?

Discoveries:

To answer the question I posed, I executed two different tests on 15 adults and 15 students. This test measured the subject’s short-term memory recall. After conducting the experiment, I looked over the results and came up with my discoveries. From the data that was collected from these two tests a study was made that the teenagers under the age of 18 had a better memory recall than the adults over the age of 30. With this observation a conclusion was made that, age does influence short-term memory recall. Also another reasons this conclusion may be true besides the results of the test is the fact that the teenagers under 18 are all relatively active and have good blood circulation to their brains. On the other hand not all of the adults over the age of 30, are as active as the teenagers under 18 leading to less circulation of the blood to the brain.

Challenges:

Through out this Bio Project experience there have been may challenges. Many of the challenges came from the experiment component of the project. Although I tried to conduct the two test in as controlled a manner as possible, it was very challenging to keep the experiment controlled and without many data discrepancies. These discrepancies could and might have affected the results of the two tests. An example of this data discrepancy is that the stress level of the different subjects could have affected the outcome of their results. Also another data discrepancy is that some people are more capable of functioning in the morning that the afternoon and vise versa so, the different times of day that I tested the subjects could have also had an impact on the results of the subject. Lastly and i believe most importantly the number of people I tested could have impacted my results. Maybe the number was too small to get a very accurate result.

Looking back:

Looking back on this project, it was very enjoyable although also very stressfull, and i can see many places where i might have done things differently. With that being said there are many thing that I would change for the next time I do an experiment or project such as this one. First off, I think I could have been a little more organized and planned for my experiments so that I could have tested much more people. Instead of doing 15 for each subject group I should have done 30 or 40. And secondly I could have done better in going deeper into the topic matter of my research. By going deeper into my research I could have specified my question to something even smaller so that my test results could not have been affected by so many outside variables.